alt Hacker NewsOk,so people use NTP to "synchronize" their clocks and then write applications that assume the clocks are in exact sync and can use timestamps for synchronization, even though NTP can see the clocks aren't always in sync. Do I have that right?
Replies
TrainedMonkey • yesterday at 9:05 PM
Depending on the application you would generally use PTP to get sub-microsecond accuracy. The real trick is that architecture should tolerate various clocks starting or jumping out of sync and self correct.
goodpoint • yesterday at 11:27 PM
*misuse timestamps for synchronization
If you are an engineer at Google dealing with Spanner, then you can in fact assume clocks are well synchronized and can use timestamps for synchronization. If you get commit timestamps from Spanner you can compare them to determine exactly which commit happened first. That’s a stronger guarantee than the typical Serializable database like postgresql: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/transaction-iso.html...
That’s the radical developer simplicity promised by TrueTime mentioned in the article.